Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhere does gold come from? Can scientists make it?
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Hey Daniel, do you ever wish you'd studied a more practical science?
What do you mean?
I think you know what I mean?
If you study, you mean, should I have studied something that has actual practical applications that could help people in their everyday lives?
Yeah? You know something that saves people's lives for example, or you know, or turned lead into gold.
Well, those are great examples because those are the two things that particle physics actually does do.
I thought turning lead into gold was alchemy. You know, is pseudoscience from hundreds of years ago.
It used to be pseudoscience, but now we have made it real science. Particle physics can actually do this, But as always there's a catch.
Welcome to our podcast. This is Annul and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we look all around the universe and try to find fascinating little nuggets of intellectual gold, or turn mysterious nuggets of intellectual lead into nuggets of understandable intellectual gold.
That's right. We are podcasts alchemists turning bad jokes into comedy gold.
That's right. We turn the mysterious into the understandable.
Physics can do anything.
We still haven't figured out teleportation or anti gravity or warp drives or you know, how to make my internet actually go quickly?
Still a mystery for me for sure. Here at my house.
We'll probably figure out teleportation before we figure out fast internet at home.
Yeah, which one's more impossible. I don't know.
If I could just teleport the data from Netflix to my TV, I wouldn't need the Internet.
Maybe that is how they do it.
That's how they should do it. At least somebody over at Netflix is pouring a billion dollars into their teleportation department right now.
So to be on a podcast, we are tackling a topic that used to be considered a magic hundreds of years ago. Right, alchemy, this idea that you can transmute or transform one element into a totally different element.
That's right. And that was back in the day when they thought that what we consider the elements were the fundamental building blocks of the universe. You know, they were like, here we found these things that make up everything, and you combine them in different ways to make cool stuff. But they seemed to be sort of the basic building blocks. They hadn't yet broken them up and found the smaller bits, and so it made sense that people were like, well, is it possible to change one kind of thing into another kind of thing? Because you know, one kind of thing, like lead, you can find it not too without much difficulty, and it's not that valuable, while other kinds of things like tremendously valuable, So it seemed appealing not just from the economic point of view, but from the sort of deep understanding point of view, like can we turn one thing into another kind of thing?
To they on the program, we'll be talking about how do you make gold? How do you make the shiny golden stuff that everybody, every human seems to want for some weird and almost arbitrary reason.
That's right, well, that's economics, right, It's all arbitrary, And it's not just about how do we make gold or how could you make gold? Or could you fabricate gold in your garage? But it's like how does the universe make gold? Like where does gold come from? Right? Was it created during the Big Bang? Is it made in the core of the Earth. Is it all made in the lab of somebody somewhere in Europe, you know, underground somewhere, or is there some other mysterious process? How is gold made?
Are we going to be selling gold making kits at the end of this podcast, Daniel could probably make a lot of money just be a box of lead with some instructions that say step one, raise a quadrillion dollars, Step two, build a particle, collider.
Done, we have a particle collider. You just need to apply for time at the Large Hadron Collider. So yeah, we'll send you a lump of gold and instructions for how to get discern.
Step one, apply apply, fill out this application.
Sure, yeah, first send us forty nine ninety nine and you'll get these incredible items.
Technically, it would be a real thing like it is actually the steps of how to make gold.
Yeah, you really can. I think it's sort of cool that we have understood the way the universe works, this sort of elemental understanding, to a point where we do see how these things are put together. We can understand them from the ground up. You know, how to assemble protons and neutrons and what makes something gold and something else. Led to the point where we can actually change them from one to the other. I mean it's not economically feasible, but we do have the power. We have conquered this barrier of the elements.
Yeah. Well, why do you think humans are so fascinated with gold? Like, out of all the elements? Why why is gold so special in human culture?
I think I have to refer to a comic made by my good friend, and whyse comic who said humans like sparkly things.
That's something my grandma always used to say.
Why is it every time you say something sort of wise, you just attributed to your grandma.
She was a wise woman.
I think it's just your humility. You don't want to come off sounding like you think your intelligence. You attribute this to this fictional grandma.
I think I just don't want to reveal that I have no idea where I got that quote.
So anonymous becomes Jorge's grandma.
Yeah, so people like shiny, sparkly things. And that's what gold is, right. It doesn't stain right, it doesn't rust when you make something out of gold. It just always stays shiny, right, that's what's special about it.
Well, yeah, of course, and the other special thing is that it's rare. Right. You don't find a lump of gold under every rock. It's not in lots of places, and so because it's hard to get, that makes it valuable. Right. But it's sort of this weird thing. I mean, my kids asked me this question, like why does gold cost so much? And it really is just, you know, something we've all decided on. You know, it's this weird thing. I never really understood about economics is that the value of something is really just what people are willing to pay for it. So we all decided that, you know, something else was better than gold, and we were willing to pay for it, then we would just read it this enormous wealth, right.
Right, Yeah, Welcome to the new podcast Daniel and Jorge explain economics.
Daniel and jorgey are clueless a bout economics and pontificate ignorantly.
Now, But there is something special about gold itself as a metal, right, It is shinier than most other elements, right, and it doesn't rust, and it's it's easy to make smooth. Right, It's something there's something special about it.
Yeah, it's malleable in this cool way, you know, but it's it is still arbitrary. It's you know, it's like beauty, right, it's just what we decide. We think it's cool, we think it's interesting. We think it looks good on jewelry and stuff. You know, why is gold so much more valuable than silver? You know, it is more rare and people do like it more, But it helds a special place, you know.
Do you think it's somehow related to our evolution to sort of like sunlight and you know, shiny light and gold that particularly gold color.
Oh man, I think that whole field of science is maloney. Is like attempt to evolutionary psychology, like this attempt to say like maybe we'd act this way because it could have been preferable medal and the savannah or something like uh huh, I think that you can make You can explain almost anything using that kind of logic.
Well, anyway, so it's rare on Earth, and that's an interesting question. Why is it rare? And how do how is it made? And could we make it here in a lab for example?
Yeah, exactly. And you know, if you start thinking about like where this stuff comes from, you might wonder like how does this stuff all get made? You know, how did things begin? You know, did was all the stuff in the universe made in the first bill a second you know, made during the Big Bang? Or would the big bang just make hydrogen and everything else get assembled later? These are really fascinating questions, and it's the kind of thing that really it's sort of the kind of puzzle that scientists can use to understand the mechanisms of the universe, like what's going on in the universe. Can we explain how much hydrogen there is, and how much iron there is, and how much of this there is. It's a huge amount of really specific data that helps us understand what's going on in the universe. We let's us build models to try to explain what we've seen. And because the data is so specific, there's so many different elements and we can measure their abundance. It gives us a lot of handles for understanding like what's going on inside stars and inside other astrophysical objects.
Oh, I see. It's kind of a question of did all the ingredients for the universe that we see around us right now, was that all there from the beginning at the Big bang? You know, that everything that we need to make the universe as it is now get created in those first few moments, or did the universe get created one way and then the ingredients of it change over time exactly?
And it's just part of this larger question of do we understand what's around us? You know, we look around us and we see, okay, we've seen this stuff. Do we understand how it got there? So we try to tell a story, you know, and we want to make sure that the story makes sense? Do we know how the story began? Do we understand why went this way and not the other way? And so, as a part, it's been like one hundred years we've been trying to piece this story together to explain why we see what you know, the stuff we see in the universe, and where it is. Can we understand it? So it's a pretty big question.
And so today on the podcast, we're talking about one specific thing, which is gold, and so we were wondering how many people out there know where gold is made or how it's made.
I walked around the campus you see, Irvine, and I popped this question to a bunch of unsuspecting students or whoever else would happen to be around campus that day, and I asked them where do you think gold is made? So before you listen to these answers, think for yourself for a moment. Do you know where gold is made?
And if you get the right answer right, you get a gold star, right, you know?
Or a lead star or a lead star and an application form.
Well, here's what people had to say.
Maybe in the sun or in another planet, I'm not sure, being like fusions in like the center of stars.
Yeah, I'm not sure I would say big bang, like in the Earth's cruss through collision, please uh.
I have no idea chemically or physically like whatever happens within core, like gold.
Funds, aliens, like thous species.
After many or so later, it's just naturally rotted and it becomes cold.
All right, A lot of interesting answers, and honestly, they all seem kind of plausible to me. You know, some people said that gold is made inside of the Earth, at the core, the core of the Earth, or inside the stars, or.
The first ones you mentioned. The ones people said maybe it was made inside the earth. That puzzled me for a bit until somebody said, you know, kind of like diamonds. Then I realized, yeah, that's true. Diamonds really are made inside the earth. It's the pressure of the Earth on carbon that creates these incredible crystals. And so it is plausible to think, like you know, jewels and gold, maybe they're just made in high temperature reactions inside the Earth. So I understood the line of thinking after a bit.
Yeah, because it's it's also kind of a rare and valuable thing, and maybe people associate rare and valuable with the things taking a long time to make and extreme conditions.
Yeah, and like many plausible ideas, it's totally wrong.
No gold start for you, exactly exactly. Well, let's get into this idea of gold. What do we know about gold?
Well, it's shiny and it looks good on your finger. But the think the thing to understand is that gold is one of the elements, right, and the identity of these elements is determined by how many protons there are in the nucleus. So remember every everything that's elemental is just an atom, right, It's not a mixture of different elements. It's just an atom. And the atom has a nucleus inside it, and the nucleus has protons and neutrons. And the thing that determines the identity which element you are? Are you hydrogen, are you helium? Are you nickel? Are you uranium? Is the number of protons in the nucleus.
Right, Because all these elements, they're not They're all just variations of the same thing, right, like different combinations of the same thing. Righted to that, we used to think that carbon and oxygen or like its own thing in the universe, but actually turned out that they're just the same thing, just rearranged differently.
Yeah, and it's more about the numbers. Like you take one proton and one electron, you get hydrogen, right, you add another proton and another electron to balance it out electrically, and you get helium. And so it's just the number of servings you get, right, that determines which element you are. And you're right. It's fascinating that these things aren't fundamental, but they are just made at the same things, but they're so vastly different. Right. Iron is totally different from helium. It's totally different from silicon, from carbon, from oxygen, but all these things are made up of the same stuff. This is the kind of thing I blows my mind every time I think about it, that the critical identity of these things comes not from what they're made out of, but just from the arrangements of the particles inside them.
Yeah. It's kind of like if you think about like your favorite recipe of your favorite kind of food, right, Like it's you add a lot of ingredients into it. Really, at the end, all of those ingredients are probably just carbon and hydrogen, right.
That's true. I don't know. I would say the critical issue for baking is whether or not includes chocolate. It includes chocolate. It's going to be tasty. Otherwise it's a question mark. I don't know.
It has chocolate. It's golden wins the gold star.
That's right. And so the thing about gold is that it's pretty heavy, right. It has a lot of protons in the nucleus. Right, So as you add a proton to a nucleus, it gets heavier and heavier, and you walk your way up the periodic table, and as an assize, you know, as.
You start with hydrogen, right, you start hydrogen is like the simplest atom is just one proton and one electron.
That's right. That's the first thing you would make. And that's the first thing that the universe did make, in fact, and still it's what most of the universe is. Most of the universe, like seventy four percent of the universe is hydrogen. And the reason is that it's the simplest thing. Right. But as you walk your way up the periodic table, you add a proton, you get more more complex stuff. And this is how we knew that there were gaps in the periodic table. Right, we said, okay, we see this element, we see that element, we see the other element. We can measure how many protons there are in the nucleus of an element, and then we put them in place, and then we could tell oh, look there's nothing with you know, this number of protons. How come we haven't found anything with that number of protons, so we go look for it and we try to make it or this kind of stuff. It's it's cool that the identity of the element is determined just by the number of protons.
Yeah, and so you start with hydrogen, and then you add a proton and you get helium, and then you add another proton, and it just you go up the list of elements and at some point you get to gold.
Right, that's right. And you know, there's one hundred and some elements that we've discovered or created by now, and each one is so different, and their properties are determined really just by how many protons, which determines how many electrons you need to balance it, and then how those atoms interact, so like, why are some of them metallic and some of them are conductors, and some of them are really active and some are inactive. All all that is determined just by how the electrons fill out their orbitals. Right, Whether they like to interact with other atoms or not, and that in turn is determined by how many protons are in the nucleus. So it's really just proton counting.
So you're saying gold is really just like a fat hydrogen.
It's like a crowd of hydrogen.
Yeah, it's just a cluster of a hydrogen and the kind of right. But then then that really changes its behaviors.
It totally changes its behavior. And it's the other thing I understand is that it's not easy to do, right. It's not that you can just very easily take two hydrogen atoms and make helium out of them. And the reason is that the nuclei don't like to hang out together. The nuclei nucleus of hydrogen atom is a proton which is positively charged. So they're going to repel each other. And we had a whole podcast episode about this recently. How does this happen? And you know, they will repel each other unless you force them together. You get them close enough together, the strong nuclear force takes over and then it attracts the quarks inside. Those protons attract each other and they overcome that called that the Coulomb barrier. Because Kulam is the guy who first thought about electromagnetic force electrostatic forces that repel each other.
Yeah, I hear. He was a cool guy.
Yeah, but there were some barriers to getting to know him.
But it's like they snap together, right, Like they repel each other, but at some point they get so close that they snap together and they become a different element.
Yeah. You can think of its sort of like hiking into a volcano. Right, You're walking up the hill and it's getting harder and harder and harder. Right, it's steeper, The sides are getting steeper and steeper and steeper. It's easier to roll down away from the center of the volcano. But once you get to the top, right, it's very easy to just like fall into the center. And so it's sort of that way.
And then you die a horrible death, right, or.
You fuse beautifully into something new. Right, you rise out of the ashes like a phoenix, something else and beautiful. Yeah. So you push them together hard enough, and that's what we call fusion. You get the strong nuclear force to take over and it makes a new nucleus, right, and it becomes something totally different. So this is alchemy, right, changing one element into another. That you just got to push hard enough, you know, or take protons out, and you can change what something is.
Okay, So that's how you make gold. You take hydrogen and you just keep building it up and at some point you go through all the elements and you get to the shiny stuff.
Right, that's right. But that's not easy to do, right, It's really hard to squeeze these things together. They don't like to be together, right, It's not the configuration they like. So the question really is not how do you make gold, but like, where in the universe does this happen? How is it even possible?
All right, let's get into that, and let's start with a big bang. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about how to make gold, and so we know how to make it, which is you build up a hydrogen atom up until you get into the different elements and eventually you get to gold. But it's a pretty extreme process, like you need a lot of energy.
That's right, You really do need a lot of energy. It's not something that's easy to do. And as usual with a hard physics question, let's start with the Big Bang, right, because the creator of all things. Right, And you might think, well, the Big Bang, that was pretty hot and dense, and so maybe all that stuff was just made in the very beginning.
Yeah, because everything was compressed, and so I would think maybe a lot of gold was made in the Big Bang.
Yeah, but it takes a while to get to gold, right, And so, and the Big Bang turns out was pretty short. You know, there was a whole lot of time there to make stuff. When the Big Bang started, it was really hot and dense. But I also remember it was expanding really fast, right, that's the bang part of it. And so the universe started out really hot and dense, but it cooled off pretty quickly. The temperature dropped very rapidly, so there was actually only about twenty minutes. I mean, I think it's kind of hilarious to talk about early universe in terms of like minutes, you know, in days and stuff like that. It's not like there was an Earth and the Sun back then to even create these the meanings of these time units. But after about twenty minutes after the Big Bang on somebody's watch, the universe cooled down so that this kind of fusion wasn't possible anymore.
So.
The things that were made in the Big Bang, of course, were fundamental particles, you know, quarks and electrons and stuff like this, and the quarks came together to make protons, and the protons and electrons found each other to make hydrogen, and there was a little bit of time left and they could make some helium and a few bits of trace elements higher up to like beryllium or maybe boron and stuff. But really the Big Bang was all about making hydrogen and helium.
You're saying, kind of like the party was over before they could make gold.
They wasted a lot of time dancing, and then they ran out of time at the end, and they hadn't really finished their homework.
Yeah, kind of right. That's what you're saying is that it was intense in the Big Bang, but then by the time that you would get to making gold, everything was already spread out and cooled off.
Yeah. And the thing that blows my mind the most is that the story hasn't really changed after twenty minutes. Twenty minutes into the universe, the universe was seventy five ish percent hydrogen and twenty five ish percent helium, and that's basically the story now. I mean, there's like one percent left over that's like other heavier stuff and that, you know, that's the bit we're talking about. That's the bits to make up me and you and all the interesting stuff in the universe that's not hydrogen and helium. But we're really just playing with the one percent. Most of the stuff in the universe is still the baryonic matter at least, I mean, we're not even talking about dark matter and dark energy. We're talking about atomic matter. It's still hydrogen and helium.
And so all the changes, all the kind of visible changes in the universe from you know, a crazy cloud of nothing of chaos and stars and planets and galaxies that that's you're saying, that's only really the one percent.
Yeah, exactly, we are the one percent.
Yeah. Well, I don't know how much. You know how much cartoons get paid, but you know, I'm more in the five to five to two pers Okay, so in the Big Bang, not a lot of gold was made.
You're saying, that's right. Basically, you get hydrogen helium and then gravity takes over. Right, You have these huge clouds of hydrogen and they're cool and they're neutral, right, so electromagnetism is not really doing much anymore. And then gravity takes over and it starts to pull this stuff together. You get these big nebula and these gas clouds get clumped together by gravity until things get dense enough that they start to heat up. Right, gravitational pressure pushes on them, and you get stars.
And so that's what a lot of people said. They said that maybe gold is made inside of stars because stars are pretty hot and there's a lot of pressure and there's a lot of explosives going on inside. So is gold made inside of stars?
The answer is no, Actually, stars are not capable of making gold. And I understand why a lot of people thought of that, because I think it's pretty commonly known these days that you know, we are all all star dust, and that's a really cool concept. You know that the stuff that makes us up is not made here or not made on Earth, or you know that it was made inside of stars somewhere else a long time ago, which then blew up. And that part is true, that a lot of the elements that make us up, the heavier elements, are made inside of stars. And we'll go through it in a little bit of detail, but it turns out stars are not capable of making things heavier than like nickel or iron.
Wait, you were saying Carl Sagan lied to us. Is that what you're saying here officially on the podcast.
Well, no, no, If you're not made of gold, then Carl Sagan was correct. If you are made of gold, then yeah, Carl Sagan was wrong. So our animatronic gold plated AI listeners you are exempt from Carl Sagan's wisdom.
Okay, got it it. It's good to know, you know, just in case I was made out a goal.
Yeah, well, you know, I haven't seen you in a few days, so maybe you did get replaced by a gold plated robot who.
Knows Okay, so you're saying a star by itself chugging along doesn't make goal.
No, And what's happening inside a star is that it's fusing, right. It's doing that thing we talked about earlier with pushing the hydrogen nuclei together close enough that the strong force takes over and it makes helium nucleus. Right, And the key thing to understand is that that's not an energy neutral event. What happens when you do that is you release energy. There's less energy in a helium nucleus than there is in two hydrogen nuclei, So when you form the helium nucleus, this energy left over, it releases energy. It's like burning, right, That's what burning is. There's less energy stored in wood ash than there is in wood, which is why when you burn it, energy is released as fire.
It's kind of like when you take two three year olds who are hyperactive and.
Then mash them together.
iPad, so only there's a lot of leftover energy. That's right.
I've never noticed them heating up, but I'm sure. But because of conservation of energy that that energy does go somewhere.
The energy just goes to the parents who are like.
Finally, Except then how come parents are always napping when their kids are on the iPad? I'm not sure how the how the energy flow works.
So there's a limit to what you can make inside of a star.
Yeah, and so that's the burning of a star, right, That's what makes the star hot, is it does this process. It releases energy and that allows it to do more. Right, And you can do more. You can take the helium nuclei, you can fuse them together, and the same thing is true that you use two helium nuclei to get something heavier and energy is released, and you can keep doing that and keep doing that, and keep doing that, and energy keeps being released, and you get heavier and heavier stuff up to like nickel or up to iron.
Right, But then at iron something special happens, right because iron is kind of a special Is that a special place in the periodic table?
Yeah, this is really interesting fact about how you put nuclei together. And remember the thing that holds the nucleus together is the strong force. Right, There's a bunch of protons and the strong forces holding them together by linking the quarks inside the protons. But once you get to iron, there's more energy stored in the heavier combinations. So if you want to take two iron nuclei and fuse them together to make whatever too iron nuclei make, then you need to add energy, right, You need to pour energy into that to make the heavier thing. So the result is that you're cooling the star instead of burning.
Right, But it doesn't actually cool it does It does absorb some of the energy from the star.
Yeah, if that happened, and it happened a lot, then it would cool the star. And so the thing you have to understand is that stars are like they're like a balance, right. They're fusing all the time. They're making this heavier stuff, and that's releasing energy. But then that stuff is also getting blown apart because it's an incredible place in there. There's all these photons. You have photodisintegration, So you're like make something heavy and then you blow it up because of heavy photons or hitting it. Then you make something heavy and you blow it up, and it's sort of gradually humulating heavier and heavier stuff. Right, But you also got to keep the star burning. If the star doesn't stay hot enough, then it collapses, right, Then it can no longer support itself from gravity winds. So if you start getting too much heavy stuff like the iron and the nickel and the stuff that if you do fuse it, it costs you energy. That's the death knell of a star. That's when a star starts to die. Yeah.
So it's like it burns all its fuel, it turns it into iron, and then it can't do anything with the iron anymore.
Exactly, to do something with the iron takes somebody adding energy. And so that's when the star starts to go out. Right, when its fuel is no longer fuel, it's something that requires work instead of releasing energy.
It's kind of like when you burn a fire, right, would you throw the logs in and it eventually the logs turn into ash and you can't do anything with that, right, You can't burn it anymore.
That's right. Yeah, you could do something with the ash, but it might require energy to do it, right, So you don't have that. It's not a self sustaining thing anymore. It's a self extinguishing thing.
Yeah, So your fire goes out.
Yeah, and so your fire goes out, and that's what happens. Right, stars burn, they make heavier stuff that they can't burn anymore, so they've used up their fuel and then they go out and you know, they spread that stuff back out into the universe. There's the solar wind, right, They're spewing particles out from the Sun from the star all the time. That spreads them out. Or they go supernova and you know, they collapse and then explode and they spew all their stuff out to the universe. And one really cool thing is that then that stuff gets gathered back together to make a new star. And so we've had these cycles of stars. We had original first stars that just burned hydrogen and turned it into helium, and then those blew up, you know, and we had different kinds of stars that primarily burn helium and heavier stuff, and those blew up, and then we had different kind of stars. And so it takes a few cycles of stars to even get up to stars capable of making things like iron and nickel. Oh I say, and those first stars are no longer even existing, Like, we haven't seen any of those first stars.
They're the ones that are pure hydrogen.
Yeah, the first cycle of stars, the original stars, the og stars. Right, We recently thought we might have seen a hint of evidence of them, but nobody's ever actually seen them directly. They're so old, they happened so long ago, they're very difficult to see. That's a whole other interesting podcast about the history of stars.
Yeah, that we know of, nobody has seen.
Yeah, that's right. And the other fascinating fact there's so many interesting things about this is that most of the really heavy stuff, like the iron and the nickel, is made in the last few moments of a star's life. Like, those things are hard to make. Even though you know it is energetically favorable to produce iron, it's a really small effect, and so you don't make a lot of it until the last few moments. Most of that stuff happens just before the supernova as like the outer bits of the star collapsing. Those are the perfect times to make iron and nickel. So like most of the iron and the nickel in the universe was made in the last few moments just before a star went supernova.
Yeah, but that's kind of the limit, right.
Yeah, exactly. These stars can't make things that are heavier. So for a long time people it's like, well, we have this great model of stars. We can explain how they made iron, how they made nickel, all this stuff. But what about this other stuff we see because there is stuff in the universe, it's heavier uranium, plutonium, gold, all this stuff. Where does that come from?
Well, let's get into that. Let's get into whether supernova are able to make these things and whether they can make gold. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, so start checking it along. Can't make gold. I can only sort of go up to iron. And that's even only when it blows up, right, Yeah, that's right after a few cycles and during the blow up. So then how does gold get made? It's not in supernovas.
It's not in supernovas. Supernovas are responsible for like the heaviest stuff the stars can make, right, And people have done a lot of extensive work on this and modeling and try to understand are there weird kinds of supernovas? Are there special circumstances under which meganova's there actually are things called killanovas? And the hyper novas and stuff like that.
That sounds like a hell of a Helenova.
Hell that's the California version, Yeah, Helenova or telenovela. It's one of the most dramatic events in the universe that's responsible for making gold and platinum and all that heavy stuff. And we've only recently figured out what this is. And what happens is not the collapse of a single star into like a neutron star or something really heavy. It's when two stars collide. So sometimes you'll have like two neutron stars that are near each other. And you remember neutron stars with this really really dense stuff. We had an episode recently about density and you know, like eastpoon of neutron star weighs as much as like a million Eiffel towers. Right, it's ridiculous. So already you have this crazy intense environment. Now imagine two of those things and they're near each other, and they're orbiting each other, and they're pulling each other together, and eventually, boom, they collide. They collapse into one object.
That's how gold is made. That's the only way we know.
That's the only way we know. Yeah, gold and all the other stuff heavier than iron is primarily made in the collapses of neutron stars, and like, it's a crazy idea, right, And for a long time people thought, but neutron star collapses, like, how often can that happen? Can there really be enough of that to make all the gold?
Wait, they collapse and then they explode out into the universe. Because if it collapses, doesn't it keep all the gold inside of it?
Yeah, they collide, they make gold, and then a lot of his is ejected. Yeah, so they explode. And we discover this recently because we saw gravitational waves. These things are heavy enough, they're big enough, and they're moving fast enough, they're accelerating enough they actually cause gravitational waves, these ripples in space and time itself. We had a whole podcast episode about that about how we saw like black holes merging and neutron star collisions, and we see this because they're so heavy that they make these ripples in space. Remember, really massive stuff bend space. That's what gravity is. And so if you have something like that moving really quickly accelerating, then its gravitational field is wiggling, and it's wiggling in a way to send waves through space that we can actually detect.
Yeah, so that's why goal is so rare. It's that it can only be made in these super rare events, which is two neutron stars which just happened to be close enough to each other to merge.
That's right. The thing that's interesting is that it's not as rare as we thought before we turned on Lego, this gravitational wave detector. They turns it on, they knew what it could see, but what they didn't know is how often is there stuff to see? Like you build this amazing telescope, this gravitational wave detector, you're looking out into the universe with sort of a new set of eyes for the first time. You don't know if it's going to be like a big party or total darkness. We just really had no idea. And the cool thing is that just after they turned it on, boom they saw gravitational wave, and then like next week, boom they saw another one. So it turns out this stuff happens a little bit more often than people were thinking. So it's not that unlikely to see neutron stars, which is why gold is rare, but not like impossible to.
Find or anything heavier than gold, right, because anything heavier than gold you also need these rare events.
Yeah, exactly. All the plutonium, all the uranium, all that kind of stuff that's made that's heavier than gold was created in these incredible cosmic collisions of neutron stars. And we know that because we saw one recently. So we saw it with the gravitational wave detector. We also saw the collision using other telescopes. So this is called multi messenger because you see the same event with light and with gravitational waves. And then we could look at what happened and look at the emissions of the stuff nearby, and we could see that there was gold just afterwards where there wasn't gold before.
Oh no kidding. It got shiny like it twinkled a little extra.
All these bracelets were made and all these nice rings, you know, stuff I think would be really wonderful. Now you could see because of the way it absorbs light from behind it and amidst light, gold has a characteristic signature, so we could see gold having been made pretty.
Awesome, kind of like if you close your eyes and you listen out into the universe, you will hear gold being made kind of right, like pop pop pop pop.
If you close your eyes and listen to the universe, I don't know what you're gonna hear, but yeah, there is. Yeah, if you listen to the gravitational waves, you hear these crazy events. That is where gold and heavy stuff is made. So it's not made in the Earth's crust, it's not made in the normal burning of stars. It's only made in these special crazy collisions of two dead stars.
So I feel like that makes it even more special than diamonds. You know, like diamonds just made or on Earth. But gold, that's that's only made in the marriage of two giant neutron stars.
No, I think you're right, and I think you know the de Beers Corporation will not be very interested in sponsoring this podcast. But diamonds, you're right, they're not that special. You know, they're just created by a lot of pressure here in the center of the Earth. But we are not capable of making gold on Earth. There's certainly not nowhere in our solar system are there the conditions to make gold, and so it is pretty unusual.
But you know, but you said you can make it at the large hadron collide.
No, you're right, you're right, we can make it at a large hadron collider sort of naturally produced gold, you know, fusing of lighter stuff. What we do with at a large hadron collider actually is we can take gold. We can take lead, which is heavier than gold, and we can strip off some of the protons. Right, you can shoot like neutrons and stuff at it to sort of break it apart and take off some of the protons to turn some lead into some gold. But we can only do it at really really low levels. Like you can't take a block of lead, and you need to turn each atom one or time into gold, which is why it would cost a quadrillion dollars.
I see, you make it the other way. You don't fuse it together, you strip down lead to make gold.
Yeah, so it's pretty much cheating because the lead also was made in the collision of neutron stars, right, so we're taking that we're just like turning it into gold. So it's like it's a very unsatisfying sort of monkey paw answer, right, like, can you make lead into gold? Yes?
So Carl Sagan didn't lie to us. You did.
That's a fairly safe assumption in general. But I don't think I said anything incorrect. We can turn lead into gold, it's just not the most of the gold that you find is not made in the Large Hadron Collider.
All right, So that's pretty pretty cool to know. So the next time you see your wedding ring maybe, or your pendant or something made out of gold out there, you should think about that it wasn't made here in Earth. It wasn't made inside of a star. It was made in a giant, really cataclysmic, crazy explosion of two giant neutron stars.
That's right. Two neutron stars gave their lives so that you could have that ring with that bracelet and give it to your special person. So you know, think for a moment about what they sacrificed and.
Then exploded out into space and somehow, some way it made it into here and into the Earth and into your finger.
Yeah. So every atom of gold has a really interesting life story, much more interesting than you. Right, has existed for a long time.
Well, I was made in the Large Hadron Collider, you know.
That's why you're so shiny and brilliant. No, every element you know that that you're made out of is pretty stable. They were not made on Earth. They were not rearranged on Earth. They've been that element for billions of years. They've survived being created inside a star or inside the collisions of neutron stars, and they've had their personality for billions of years, and they're just temporarily for this brief moment part of you.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that discussion and learn a little bit about where are the heavy elements come from?
And I hope you and with that golden nugget of intellectual thought.
And if you want to eject some gold and send it to us, send it to me my address.
That's right. Thanks for tuning in. And if you have a question about our crazy, golden, beautiful, nasty, weird universe, send it to us. I have questions at Danielanjorge dot com. We love your emails.
See you next time.
All right, thanks for listening. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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